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THE
AMERICAN PROSPECT
A
Perfect Killing? McVeigh Proves Why We Need
a Moratorium on the Death Penalty
by
Tom Lowenstein For the last 4 years, as evidence has grown that
the death penalty system in this country is rusted through, death
penalty supporters have held one person aloft as the shining
example of why we "need" capital punishment in this
country: Timothy McVeigh. Point out that the federal death penalty
has been sought almost 80 percent of the time against minorities,
and supporters of the death penalty point to McVeigh. What about
the almost 100 innocent people let off of death row since 1977?
McVeigh is the answer. Ninety-seven percent of people on death row
are indigent? McVeigh. Questions about the reliability of
eyewitness testimony? Again, McVeigh. What about the fact that a
forensic scientist in Oklahoma City whose testimony helped send 23
people to death row (11 of whom have been executed already) is now
being investigated for lying under oath on scores of occasions?
McVeigh is why we need capital punishment, the perfect case: He
did it, he was well-represented at trial, and race cannot have
played a role in his conviction or sentence. Most importantly, he's
the "worst of the worst." These four aspects of McVeigh's
case make him a virtually unprecedented death row inmate; to say
he's the exception to the rule of how the death penalty is
administered in this country is an appalling understatement. To
put it another way, if you believe in the death penalty because of
Timothy McVeigh, you must then concede that clear-cut death
penalty cases come along once or twice in a lifetime. All that
aside, it now turns out that even the "perfect" death
penalty case is far from perfect. The FBI failed to provide
McVeigh's defense team with more than 3,000 pages of documents
during the trial. Whether the 3,000-page omission happened because
of dishonesty or incompetence or a faulty computer system, we don't
know. What we do know is that in possibly the most important
capital case this century, the proceedings were terribly bungled.
If the Federal Government can't get the McVeigh prosecution right,
what does that tell us about the cases of the 3,500 or so people
on death rows across this country? And what of Raul Garza, next in
line to be executed under federal law, who, being Hispanic and
having been convicted of crimes that do not so clearly mark him as
"the worst of the worst," is a more accurate
representation of the federal death penalty in action? Does
President Bush care about fairness in his case enough to delay
Garza's execution pending a review of the troubling racial bias of
the federal death penalty? Of course not. Attorney General John
Ashcroft has already announced that he won't allow McVeigh's
execution to be put off beyond the new June 11 date. In doing so,
he has made it clear that he and President Bush care nothing about
real fairness -- 30 days to review more than 3,000 pages in a case
this big? -- but only about the appearance of fairness. And he has
done nothing to assuage the steadily increasing doubts we
Americans have about how the death penalty is administered in this
country. And look what the FBI has done to the families of the
victims. The federal government, which has spent the last five
years telling the families of McVeigh's victims that they'll feel
better when he's dead -- indeed, even to the extent of providing
closed-circuit television viewing of the execution for a few
hundred of them -- is now responsible for causing those people
even more pain. The government has held out the carrot of "closure"
and has snatched it away at the last moment. We know McVeigh's
execution won't serve as a deterrent -- in fact, we know that in
killing him we are acceding to his wishes. We've made him a media
star and a martyr. A society that kills is so angry, it is willing
to do what isn't in its best interest just to see the enemy suffer.
Apologists for the death penalty may argue that the government's
role is to make sure punishment is applied judiciously, without
anger, but the government has no right to impose punishments that
are arbitrary or capricious, and our government has proven
incapable of creating a death penalty system that is fair and even
close to error-free (it doesn't even seem capable of making our
current system less error-prone). The bungled McVeigh case has
made one thing clearer than ever: The federal government should
declare a two-year moratorium on all executions, and each of the
38 states with death penalty statutes should follow suit. The
McVeigh case has proven, once and for all, that no system is
perfect. McVeigh's lawyers need time to carefully review the
recently discovered documents, and our country needs time to
undertake a thorough review of the death penalty, from the ground
up. The consensus building behind such a moratorium has grown
steadily, with conservatives like Pat Robertson, George Will, and
John Whitehead calling for a moratorium. Democratic Senators
Russell Feingold, Carl Levin, Paul Wellstone, and Jon Corzine have
been gaining support for such an idea in Congress. Those who
support capital punishment should be loudest among those calling
for a moratorium, because in defending a system as clearly broken
as ours, they do a great disservice to their "moral"
arguments in favor of capital punishment -- if they won't even
admit that a system as shoddy as the one now in place needs
fixing, how can we trust their morals? A moratorium on executions
would allow the government to assess the death penalty and try to
correct the enormous flaws in the system without executing anyone
in the meantime. It may also allow a dialogue about the biggest
flaw with the death penalty -- the punishment itself. Even before
recent revelations, the McVeigh case brought us to the hard nub of
the death penalty question: Why shouldn't we kill people who
deserve to die? Many liberals argue that, as Wendy Kaminer put it
in a recent issue of The American Prospect, "[t]he question
is dramatic but irrelevant" because the system is so badly
flawed. Such liberals do as great a disservice to their arguments
against capital punishment as death penalty proponents do in
insisting that the system has no problems. People support the
death penalty because in the wake of murder, the anger we all feel
is consuming, as is the sense -- for many of us -- that justice
demands the killers pay for their crimes with everything they have.
The question of whether we should kill people who deserve to die
is, therefore, the most important question in the death penalty
debate. To answer it, first of all, put the idea of "closure"
out of your mind. "Closure" is a concept too cheaply
trumpeted by those who haven't had someone they love murdered and
only hoped for by those who have. The hard, cold reality of losing
someone to murder is that they are gone, and nothing will ever
close that wound. Some things may make you feel a little better
for a while, and hopefully McVeigh's execution will do that for
some of the families he attacked. But that is very different from
"closure." Our government ought not be in the business
of seeking "closure" for some families while hurting
others -- the families who don't want McVeigh executed, or who
feel that they and their murdered loved ones are only diminished
by the execution. Rage, anger, a desire for justice: Most of us
feel these things in the wake of murder, let alone in the wake of
mass murder. In the end, the government should not kill McVeigh
and other murderers not because they deserve compassion, but
because what we do to them is a direct reflection of who we are as
a country. After McVeigh is dead, we Americans will be left with
our conscience and our flawed justice system. Do we take the
passion for justice that we all feel and put it to work preventing
violence and saving lives, or do we pour it out, ruthlessly and
haphazardly, in the venom of executions because we can point to a
guy like McVeigh and say, "But he deserves it"? We are
raised to believe that two wrongs don't make a right. We don't
rape rapists or chop off the hands of thieves. We do kill killers.
What does that make us? Tom Lowenstein
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